Bone white sheen,
and she has slipped
quietly away
from you in sleep,
the phosphorescence
of a shallow lingers
wide, enveloping
arm, leg
an anthem
of doomed corals,
a submerged republic
that rides up onto
the waters of the night,
bring back voices
over the surf, into
this quiet
who
shuffling back, late
from that shore
of lost spirits,
wasted no time
in enfolding, street
by street, an entire
imago, the chaos
of your life, in her mind
a skull
of forsaken memories,
emporium of dreams, where
remains of the displaced
and the exploited grip
the eyes’ ebb, flight
towards another coast
that’s unenveigled, transparent
gauging
the precise angle,
of the head and feet, the
body’s disposition, waits
among the abaca and
the looms of shipwrecked
hands, and dances,
though the signs
are not propitious
speaks
out of the dried up
reservoirs, the slums
of bought-off voters, declining
to name the price
of silence, her hands
arranging the wreaths
of victims, spread
and undressed
binds,
with a calla lilly,
the broken waist
of the water,
a bracelet of tiny scars
round her wrist,
the blood of indentured labourers
on haciendas
darkening her streams
drawn
into each small
hollow, cove, breathing
an exile’s prayer, an anthem
of deception,
the filth of clogged esteros
filling the streets,
you wait,
uneasily, on the night’s
escarpment of bone,
where
flotsam, gulls,
and driftwood meet
the horizon, level with the edge
of some glittering repose,
the heart pounds
solitary, moving
between itself and others,
clear
light of moon
to navigate you through
reefs, drawing
around you a fleet of ghosts,
words – land reform,
abolition of oligarchy –
tilling air
to see
what will grow
on shifting current.
Thin,
like a wafer,
they dissolve
upon the tongue …
indigent’s breath,
crepuscular
flower of the retreating
jungle, invoking them
you invoke yourself,
again
amidst a catafalque
of blooms, of horns.
In desolate barrios,
bound for foreign
aquariums, the doomed
corals of the republic
raise, like bleached bone,
their branches up
into an air in which
they drown.
